The thing I like most about Slack is the ability to add custom emoji – absolutely ingenious. We got a couple of different checkbox ones for status updates, with

The thing I like most about Slack is the ability to add custom emoji – absolutely ingenious. We got a couple of different checkbox ones for status updates, with a question mark inside the box, an exclamation mark, crossed out, checked, which makes it really easy to convey different nuances of "done" and "not done". We have lots of product icons (AWS, GCP etc.) as emoji, so alerts can have the appropriate service logo in them, so people can scan and filter them much easier, plus consistent emoji for different urgency levels. And a lot of fun ones, too, which add some lightheartedness to overly serious conversations. There's a kind of meta-level communication and inside jokes going on in our team via Emoji reactions that otherwise would only work in person. Might not be for everyone, but it works tremendously well for us. Custom emoji give us a really neat way of making such a clean virtual space ours, of making it a bit more human; something that feels sorely needed in a world of cleanly UXed platforms and tools and walled gardens where people get data-driven into funnels. Human-ness is also something that I feel state-of-the-art AI routinely takes away from things and spaces where it is a dominant feature. What AI we have is quite useful to blur the background of a video call; after all, that requires an understanding of what a human form looks like on video and not much more. After herculean efforts and gazillions of metric tons of training data, that works quite well nowadays. But getting human communication to a degree that would allow for any meaningful assistance in a chat app? Color me very sceptic. If my social ads are any measure for this, there's still a long way to go, and that should be orders of magnitude easier – I interact with a lot of content that isn't that hard to categorize, just show me photography equipment ads already! You don't even necessarily need to deep-mine my natural language content for that. And yet I get shown all those smart toilet ads, no idea why. That's not just unhelpful – it ensures the whole social media experience won't ever feel human and welcoming in the way random threads on low-tech PHP forums did back in the day, or the way a Slack convo can feel nowadays. Not while that stupid robot ant-brain is constantly breathing down my neck and interjecting smart toilet content; it's weird and uncanny, please stop. I really don't understand why AI would be required to make people convert to premium in an app like Slack, or stay beyond the lockdown. Whatever happened to just making a great tool that's helpful and useful and a joy to use? If anything, it might be the opposite: Annoying, unhelpful, obnoxious AI assistance would drive people off quickly – think Clippy, but in a product that isn't remotely as entrenched and without alternative as MS Office back in the day. The way modern software tends to replace user choice with data-driven fits-for-most defaults, there might not even be a proper "off" setting for such a thing. Please don't, thank you very much.